Category: Blog

One of the major annoyances with the redesign of this weblog was that its precipitous nature was such that many of the sidebar links, etc., were removed. But, it did make me admit a major point: blogrolls are pretty much dead. In the early years of the blogsophere they served as a way to share traffic and endorse sites of interest. But with the rise of RSS, and later Twitter and its confederates they went into decline. By the end I barely recalled which sites I had on my blogroll; most of them I followed in via RSS. So I’m not going to recreate one at this point. Rather, if you want to get a sampling of what I read and such, please see my Pinboard page (to which you can subscribe via RSS if it suits you). And of course you can follow me on Twitter, though that will include my banter with other people and such. A more likely avenue is to note which websites I link to in my posts…though I’m not a copious linker to other blogs at this point….

You may have heard that Andrew Sullivan & compnay’s The Daily Dish is leaving The Daily Beast. This is making some waves in the blogosphere, with many of my thoughts being in line with Tyler Cowen‘s. I’ve followed Sullivan’s career since the mid-1990s when he was editing The New Republic, and I remember reading Virtually Normal in 1999. In 2000 I noticed he had is own independent website, and over the course of the decade he’s become a internet impresario of sorts. In those years Andrew Sullivan has linked to Gene Expression in one of its incarnations many times. The Daily Dish has also been one of the major boosters of another website with which I am involved, Secular Right. I was even solicited for my own reflections on the 10 year anniversary of Sullivan’s blog.

Back the summer of 2002 I recall a friend of mine telling me, “so you’re a pundit now!” I’d been blogging for a few months, and I didn’t feel like a pundit, whatever that meant. ~10 years on I guess I am a pundit. In that vein I was discussing with a friend what it took “to be a blogger” (they wanted to get into the game). First, blogger is a rather expansive category. I have no idea what one would need to do to be a food blogger beyond any old person off the street. But I do know how to be what I am. I focus on three things:

This morning on Twitter the estimable Carl Zimmer stated that I had “reported” on the recent paper on European skin pigmentation evolution. I wondered, wait, am I a reporter? I don’t really know, and this really is rooted in the “am I a journalist” thread. I’m starting to get worn down by those who claim I am a journalist. My main issue is that once you’re pegged as a journalist, you’re held to journalistic standards. So, for example, people might demand that I selectively misquote and misrepresent the opinions of others, because I might alienate readership by telling them what I think, instead of using mouthpieces who I don’t even bother depicting with any accuracy. I’m only half-kidding here. I’ve had great experiences with journalists, and not so great experiences. I really, really, hate it when people go fishing for quotes to fit their story arc.

In regards to papers, I don’t exactly take the tack of someone like Ed Yong or Dave Munger. I’m just a guy offering my own unvarnished opinions, and the reality is what I do “on the blog” intersects strongly with the way I talk and behave in “real life.” If this blog is journalism than a huge portion of my time chilling with my boys is journalism And, a substantial proportion of the posts here emerge directly from reader questions. Oh, and sometimes I tell readers what I really think of them, which is often not much. All of this just doesn’t seem right to me as journalism. So I don’t feel it is. Randall Parker suggests a new word, “rifting.” Though that got me to thinking: a lot of what I do is “sifting.” The content of others, but also my own thoughts.

As a means of publicizing the vast quantity of high-quality content material uniquely available on its recently released website, UNZ.org is announcing a historical research competition.

A First Prize of $10,000 and several other cash prizes will be awarded for the most significant and interesting discussion or analysis of some historical issue based on the published source material provided at UNZ.org. All entries must be received by August 31, 2012, and awards will be made by September 30, 2012.

I need to rationalize my process of modulating the stream of comments I get. Toward that end I am going to be posting an “open thread” once every week (I’ve scheduled the next month already). If you have the urge to leave an off-topic comment on a post immediately, just put it here. You can of course contact me, but I understand that is often suboptimal, insofar as you may wish for input from other readers. Because this option is available I am inclined to simply delete off-topic comments more aggressively now, with repeated violations resulting in banning.

The nature of the restrictions of the comments are relatively loose on this post. You should maintain some decorum as usual. But you can post links, ask me or other readers questions, etc.

This is probably relevant if you have a blog or run a webzine of some sort. It’ll be much more abstract if you are a commenter, and can’t relate concretely to weirdo creeps who persistently spam your comments and contact you via email. In relation to bloggingheads.tv my own two primary complaints from my experience on that web-show:

Interesting discussion on the nature of media today, and the tendency toward driving traffic via the information equivalent of Twinkies. Below are my top 10 posts since moving to Discover Magazine measured by visits. The numbers to the right is the ratio of visits of the post over the past 2 years to the rough number of visits in an average day on this weblog.

There’s something about this 1995 single from Collective Soul, The World I Know, which is redolent to me of the Pacific Northwest.* Yes, it’s precious, but the Pacific Northwest is a bit precious. The land of misty mornings, SWPLs, and strong coffee. The shadows alternating with colorized high key lighting common in these alter-rock videos from the mid-90s does neatly parallel some of the scenery which you encounter in the geography of that region. It was only through happenstance that my family moved to the land of big trees when I was on the cusp of puberty, but it was where I matured as a person. Living outside the Northwest now I regularly identify as a Northwesterner, and I certainly miss some of the perks of that region, though I could do without the feeling that I’m walking around in a cloud forest scene in a fantasy novel all the time. ’till we see each other again, on 47th and Division.

Bora Zivkovic has what is basically a short history of science blogging up. I was one of those who was there at the beginning, and I honestly can’t say that he left anything of great relevance out of the narrative. In normal circumstances I don’t think much about what I do, I do. But one thing I will add: blogging isn’t some exotic and peculiar aspect of science anymore, many labs use WordPress as a content management system. Blogs as they were 10 years ago aimed out, toward the populace. Today the info-ecological niches what we would have called blogs fill are much more diverse. Some blogs basically exist to update lab members and interested researchers on their publications and journal club. I add these to my RSS even though I’m not a member of the lab and don’t participate in the journal club because they’re educational to me (e.g., gc bias). Imagine, if you will, that R. A. Fisher had had a blog at Rothamsted. Though this is an opportunity to point you to the R.A. Fisher Digital Archive in case you don’t know about it. We live in rich times for the infovore.

I’ve been thinking that I should post about what it’s been like being a blogger for 10 years. 1/3 of my recollected life! (I recall fragments of being 3, but continuity of self starts somewhere at the end of my 4th year) Actually, I always assumed I would do this post in 2012 when I joined ScienceBlogs in 2006 and realized I could turn this hobby/sidelight into a source of semi-professional fulfillment. But now that the time is nigh (I started blogging in April 2002, while the original Gene Expression launched in June of 2002) I find myself procrastinating, ironic in light of the fact that blogging is often parodied by some as a form of procrastinating. I will say that whenever I have a “9-5″ (or, in my case more often an 8:30 to 6:30 at minimum) I don’t ever write for the blog during those hours (if a post shows up in that period, it’s a feature called scheduling enabling that miracle, something obviously unknown to those readers who stupidly ask “why are you posting now loser! Shouldn’t you be hittin’ on bangin’ chicks, like I am on Friday nights?”). So blogging is not a way procrastinate for me. It is a way to say what I need to say.

But in any case, something over at MetaFilter has prompted me to perhaps reflect on what blogging has become, at least for me. One Allen Spaulding observes:

So I was going to write a whole thing about how this isn’t actually terrible smart writing and that the whole thing reads like a B- paper in Behavioral Econ 201 at a second tier university, but I’ll let this quote do all the work for me:

Second, people who gain a Ph.D. at least know something of theoretical interest. This applies even to an unemployed history Ph.D.!

This is a weird cottage industry – taking obvious problems and using every available tool incorrectly to get clicks so you can sell more ads for penis creme.

Obviously I’m not going to defend my posts on law school as awesome pieces of writing. On the contrary! Yet I’m always aroused toward some curiosity whenever people criticize the content of these non-science related posts. For example, performed a routine analysis of GSS data, and someone in a forum like MetaFilter (I forget which) dismissed the results as something that a graduate student in political science might write as a paper. Here’s the point I want to emphasize: I did not spend more than 30 minutes on the post which the commenter judges as being a B- paper at a second tier university! Question: what’s the going rate for such papers? I could produce a bunch per day if needed. Similarly, the commenter dismissing my GSS posts as something a political science Ph.D. could easily generate might be curious to know that some of my posts of that genre are written in less than 1 hour while I’m killing time in public transportation tethering to my phone so I have an internet connection. The method is rather easy to replicate:

1) Question

2) Look for data sets to test question

Unfortunately not too many people find this practice congenial, so the niche is left to a few odd bloggers (e.g., Audacious Epigone, the Inductivist). Naturally, sometimes I do put a lot of effort into a post. For example, I remember precisely that this post took me about 6 hours total to write. I ran it through two edits, instead of my customary single instance. Though I have to admit here that my very long posts are really not creations de novo, rather, they’re a stitching together of analytic modules I’ve developed over 10 years, or, have had kicking around in the back of my head. Any novel inferences I might have are never obtained through the process of writing. Rather, they serve as seeds for the writing itself.

The genetics of the Malagasy people have been essentially unstudied. Analysis of Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA markers have corroborated the lingustic evidence that the Malagasy result from admixture between southeast Asian and east African populations [1,2]. However, no genome-wide data from Malagasy individuals has been analyzed to date (with the exception of the individuals in this project).

Our goal is to address a number of questions about the genetics of the Malagasy. These include, but are not limited to:

1. What fraction of ancestry in the Malagasy is from Africa rather than southeast Asia?
2. Does this fraction vary geographically and/or ethnically?
3. Who were the populations that first settled Madagascar?
4. Was Madagascar settled once from southeast Asia, or multiple times?
5. Can we use genetics to more precisely date the arrival of African populations in Madagascar?

Our approach to this project is to use data contributed from Malagasy individuals who have been genotyped by a personal genomics companies. If you would like to contribute your data, please contact us.

Current results are available from the tabs at the top of this site, and will be updated as the project progresses.

Again, thanks to the people who contributed to genotype the second person. Second, there were several complaints in the origin threads that these individuals were not representative. If this is so, get some genotypes!

I’m not big into music, being of the aesthetically retarded set, but as I age memory becomes more important, and that is strongly colored by music. The 80s anthems of the Beastie Boys were part of the cultural firmament for me, but at that stage I was more of a Transformers kind of guy. In contrast, So What’cha Want takes me back to the summer of ’92 in a very visceral way. I had come to an age where the Beastie Boys were no longer social white noise, but the rhythm of a life which seemed to roll out before me with possibilities (OK, let’s keep it real, at the time the possibilities were quite proximate and driven by hormonal rushes of puberty).

Update: Actually, I was going to put up a post “10 years in blogging.” But right now I don’t have the time, seriously. 10 years is a LONG time though, so I now feel more comfortable talking about events “offline” which date to over half a decade in the past. One thing to note is that my current style of comment moderation crystallized in the mid-2000s because of various time constraints. The fact that I was going to school full time, or had a 65 hour a week job as my firm was coming up to a software release date, and, was in a long distance relationship, was not anyone’s business (did I mention I had freelance web development projects on the side, and was developing a content management system for a client as well?). But it certainly inculcated in me a lack of patience for bullshit. I was cranking out blog posts on Sundays, and in the hour I had after dinner & and my freelance project and before sleep. I recall in the fall of 2006 amusingly some moron left a comment about how I must have a lot of time, since I was posting on Friday evening. Apparently cron jobs and scheduled posts were strange and exotic concepts to the idiot. If there’s anything that’s become a motto for this weblog that emerged during that period f my life, it’s this: don’t be stupid or lazy. I try not to be stupid, and if I could manage to blog with all the various things that have gone on my life in the past, you can manage to not insult me with idiotic commentary born of lack in forethought or consideration.

In any case, I plan on blogging away. I do have lots of offline responsibilities, with my daughter foremost. But I started talking about “retiring” from blogging in 2004 to my co-bloggers at GNXP classic. It hasn’t happened yet. I have a big mouth. Though expect variance in posting frequency to continue.

Go back to original post:

You may have noticed that I put up a great many posts up over the last 24 hours. There’s a reason for that. In April of 2002 I began a blog. That was a long time ago. I’ve met post-docs at conferences who read me in high school! My blogging ‘career’ started on a lark. I was playing around with designing a content management system to learn Java Servlets. I sent my website link to a few friends to test it for bugs, and Steve Sailer linked to me, which resulted in new traffic. In May of 2002 somehow I got on Glenn Reynolds‘ blogroll. This was back when blogrolls meant something! In June of 2002 I joined the new ‘Gene Expression’ group weblog, though I stipulated that I was not going to be the ‘front person.’ Let’s just say that it didn’t quite work out that way….

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This blog is about evolution, genetics, genomics and their interstices. Please beware that comments are aggressively moderated. Uncivil or churlish comments will likely get you banned immediately, so make any contribution count!